New books depict the retailer as a triumph of Christian conservative politics.

The world is going soft on Wal-Mart (WMT). From 2005 to 2007, two union-funded organizations—employing more than 50 activists—dedicated significant time and resources to attacking the company, especially for its abuses of workers' rights, which included low wages, sex discrimination, and theft of overtime pay. Journalists shared the animus, and negative stories about the company appeared several times a week throughout 2005. But we've all eased up on the Bentonville, Ark., discount giant. Wal-Mart has been born again as a chapter of the Sierra Club, improving its reputation among elites. More importantly, during the election of 2008, union members and other liberal activists had another priority: winning the presidency. Now, anti-Wal-Mart organizing is on hiatus, as most labor groups hope to address the company's problems through legislative means, especially health care reform and the Employee Free Choice Act. It seems fitting that in this less-feverish environment, with fewer press releases flying, more scholarly work on the company should emerge.

Bethany Moreton's To Serve God and Wal-Mart: The Making of Christian Free Enterprise views the company as product of its region, showing that its success has depended on a bizarre reconciliation of Northwest Arkansas's uneasy cocktail of anti-corporate populism, racial homogeneity, evangelical Christianity, and free enterprise. Nelson Lichtenstein's The Retail Revolution: How Wal-Mart Created a Brave New World of Business situates the company in its national context, especially the rise of laissez-faire economics and the decline of organized labor. Activists and journalists criticizing Wal-Mart's business practices—from child labor to violations of organizing rights—are often asked, Why pick on Wal-Mart when so many other businesses also engage in these unattractive behaviors? The usual answer is that as an industry leader, Wal-Mart has the power to set standards—or drag them down. But Moreton and Lichtenstein show that this is not the only reason Wal-Mart matters. The mega-retailer is significant not only as a business success story but as an ideological triumph for the right.

Bethany Moreton charts this triumph brilliantly. While liberal observers have, in recent years, wondered why people of modest means would ever embrace anti-government, pro-business politics—What's the Matter With Kansas?, as Tom Frank demanded—Moreton shows that it's not because they're hoodwinked. Just like Kansas, Northwest Arkansas, ground zero for the movement against chain stores in the early 20^th century, used to harbor populist hostility to big business. How, then, did this region become home to the largest and most rapaciously exploitive retailer on earth? It was not a purely top-down political achievement. Rather, women of the Sun Belt, entering the service-economy work force, coped with profound upheavals in family and work life by creating a new ideology for themselves, and Wal-Mart followed their lead. Over the course of the 20^th century, these women left subsistence farming behind and reinvented rural populism into a new worldview that could embrace both evangelical religion and a devout faith in the market: Christian free enterprise. Critical to this fusion was the idea of the "servant leader," an ideal that exalted service-sector labor into a calling despite meager compensation and poor opportunities for advancement. When female hourly Wal-Mart workers talk about their work, they tend to emphasize their relationships with customers, how good it feels to help people.

Equally astute is Moreton's assessment of how Wal-Mart customers in the region learned to love consumerism despite cultural antipathies. As Moreton points out, Protestantism, with all its prohibitions on sensual pleasure and, indeed, on leisure itself, has had an uneasy relationship to consumer capitalism. Sam Walton needed to convince "his notably underconsuming Ozark neighbors to buy in abundance," Moreton explains. "Ideologically, the challenge was to find a form of purchasing that did not suggest sensual self-indulgence." While the department store—as Theodore Dreiser describes it in his 1900 novel Sister Carrie, a tale of a country girl's fall from innocence—was viewed as a site of sinful desire and greed, Wal-Mart was the opposite. It was—and is—all about frugality, which renders shopping at Wal-Mart not just acceptable but a genuine Protestant virtue. As Moreton points out, the store's interiors "were ostentatiously stripped-down, no-frills places entirely lacking in sensual ambience." Even better, Wal-Mart made shopping into an expression of "family values," where mostly women customers came—unlike wantonly selfish consumers like Sister Carrie or Carrie Bradshaw—to provide for their children.

Lichtenstein's book is less analytically groundbreaking than Moreton's, but The Retail Revolution is usefully comprehensive and offers the best account yet of the myriad problems that Wal-Mart employees endure, including the elaborate measures the company has taken to avoid paying workers' compensation to employees injured on the job. Lichtenstein agrees with Moreton that, as impressive as Wal-Mart may be as a business phenomenon, some of the company's greatest feats have been political: resisting government regulation, lobbying against labor law reform, fighting unionization in its stores, and maintaining a corporate culture of remarkable consensus (or even, as anyone knows after witnessing the Wal-Mart cheer, fervor). Unlike any other retailer, Wal-Mart has, when criticized for its low wages and anti-union extremism, made political and economic arguments in its own defense: arguing that Wal-Mart's prices are so low that they've offered, in CEO Lee Scott's words, "a lifeline for millions of middle and lower-income families who live payday to payday. In effect, [Wal-Mart] gives them a raise every time they shop with us." Lichtenstein, to his credit, is willing to shed academic objectivity and intervene in such bogus arguments, pointing out that consumer goods now represent only 18 percent of a family's budget, while the costs of housing, health care, and education have skyrocketed. None of these expensive things can be purchased at Wal-Mart, he notes, but they can be bought with higher wages, which Wal-Mart has always done everything in its political power—fighting EFCA, quashing efforts to raise the minimum wage—to oppose.

It's still unclear whether the recent political misfortunes of the right will significantly affect Wal-Mart; certainly the company's domestic sales are holding up remarkably well in the recession. Lichtenstein thinks the Obama presidency will surely be bad news for the Wal-Mart business model. True, Obama's labor secretary, Hilda Solis, may do a better job of enforcing of wage-and-hour laws than her predecessor did, but the larger question of whether Wal-Mart workers will be able to join a union depends at least partly on labor law reform, whose future is wildly uncertain. We may be, as Lichtenstein suggests, approaching the end of "the age of Wal-Mart," but can we create an economic order in which the generosity and dedication of Bethany Moreton's "servant leaders" might find a better outlet than wild cheers for abusive masters? Too soon to predict, but let's hope so.